Virtually Real or Really Virtual: Towards a Heritage Metaverse? JEREMY HUGGETT, University of Glasgow, UK The hype surrounding the impending mainstreaming of Virtual Reality can seem to prioritize the digital above the critical. With the development of VR said to be at a pivotal point, there is an important opportunity to consider the emergence of virtual heritage and its potential futures. This paper argues that there is a disjunction between the present reality of virtual heritage and virtual reality and discusses the twin challenges of presence and realism within virtual reality. In particular, it highlights a paradox inherent in virtual heritage and virtual reality and proposes the use of ‘loose-realism’ as a solution. Ultimately, the challenge is to address the claims that virtual reality represents a new class of information system, or metaverse, in order that virtual heritage fully engages with inquiry about the past. Key words: Virtual Reality, Virtual Heritage, Virtual Presence, Virtual Realism, Virtual Immersion, Archaeogaming. SDH Reference: Jeremy Huggett. 2019. Virtually Real or Really Virtual: Towards a Heritage Metaverse? SDH, 4, 1, 1-15. https://doi.org/10.14434/sdh.v4i1.26218 1. VIRTUAL DEVICES AND VIRTUAL WORLDS Virtual Reality (VR) has been a long time in coming. In the 1950s the film industry was actively pursuing the creation of sensory experiences alongside developments in wide-screen pictures, stereophonic sound, and 3D images. One system that made it to the prototype stage in 1962 was Morton Heilig’s Sensorama Simulator – an arcade-like device which featured a vibrating seat, handles, viewing holes, and a set of vents providing breezes and chemical scents [Turi 2014]. Perhaps closer to what we now perceive as VR was Ivan Sutherland’s development of the head-mounted three-dimensional display, nicknamed the ‘Sword of Damocles’ because it was suspended from the ceiling above the user’s head. The headset presented a pair of miniature cathode ray tube screens providing stereo vision, and the computer-generated perspective wire frame environments responded to head movements [Sutherland 1968]. In the 1970s and 1980s, the US Air Force and NASA continued to explore the development of VR, and in 1985 NASA developed the Virtual Environment Workstation which incorporated a head-mounted display, head tracker, speech recognition, data glove and 3D audio [Fisher et al. 1987]. However, technological limitations and cost meant that VR Author's address: Jeremy Huggett, Archaeology, School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK; email: [email protected] © [2019] by the author; licensee Studies in Digital Heritage, IU, Bloomington (IN), USA. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC). Studies in Digital Heritage, Vol. 4, No. 1, Publication date: June 2020 4:2 J. Huggett was largely reserved for areas such as medical simulation, flight simulators, and industrial design, and few people could experience it. Attempts to bring VR to the wider public during the 1990s, such as Nintendo’s Virtual Boy and Sega’s VR, were commercial failures. However, the rapid development of accessible and relatively affordable mobile and wearable technologies during recent years has brought us to what some have argued is a pivotal moment for virtual reality [e.g. Day 2015]. Devices such as the Oculus Rift and the Valve HTC Vive launched in early 2016 with Sony’s Playstation VR and Microsoft’s Hololens following soon after. These and devices like them were anticipated to see the rise of consumer-VR [e.g. Johnson 2015] although its uptake has been slower than anticipated [e.g. Bajarin 2018]. At the same time, increasingly compelling historical worlds were being created as the basis for mainstream gaming. For instance, Ubisoft’s historical reconstructions in recent editions of their Assassin’s Creed games are visually striking and have a considerable degree of historical accuracy while including some modifications to support the gameplay [Reinhard 2018a: 188-89]. In the reconstruction of revolutionary Paris in 1798 that underpins Assassin’s Creed Unity, for example, rooflines were altered to facilitate the parkour movement traditionally associated with the protagonist [Webster 2014], while the highly detailed 1:1 internal and external reconstruction of Notre Dame cathedral includes modifications creating pathways through the structure as well as different internal artwork required for copyright reasons [Makedonski 2014]. Released in 2015, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate did much the same for Victorian London of 1868 although with perhaps greater license in favor of the gameplay, including the shrinking of distance and omission of some areas of London [Kerr 2015] as well as a range of other historical shortcuts [Nielson 2015]. Archaeological reconstruction came to the fore in Assassin’s Creed Origins, released in 2017, with an open-world recreation of ancient Egyptian cities and their surroundings [Nielson 2017] produced in collaboration with a number of archaeologists and including an educational mode with over 70 guided tours covering aspects of Egyptian life and ritual [MacDonald 2018; Webster 2018]. This was followed up by the release of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in 2018 with its recreation of Ancient Greece [Nielson 2018; Garst 2018]. Ubisoft also released Far Cry Primal in 2016, a game which sought to recreate a Mesolithic world incorporating hunting, gathering, and crafting [see Brouwers 2016; Morgan 2016; Riris 2016a,b,c,d]. Not surprisingly, Ubisoft also moved into virtual reality gaming in order to capitalize on the anticipated mainstreaming of VR headsets, but such games do not as yet incorporate their historical environments (although it is likely that Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight VR uses simplified assets from Assassin’s Creed Unity to create a deserted and overgrown version of Paris [e.g. Hartup 2016; Takahashi 2015]). 2. VIRTUALLY REAL HERITAGE? As a consequence of all this creative activity, it is not unreasonable to suggest that Virtual Reality is at a transformative time. Where does that leave virtual heritage? In most cases, authors are agreed that virtual heritage sits at the intersection between VR and cultural heritage, although interestingly most definitions focus on imagery and three-dimensionality and make little reference to virtual reality itself, something that has previously been observed [Pujol Tost 2008: 106-7]. Studies in Digital Heritage, Vol. 4, No. 1, Publication date: June 2020 Virtually Real or Really Virtual? 4:3 Although the scope of definitions of virtual heritage (like that of cultural heritage itself) is broad, ranging in scale from portable artefacts to buildings, settlements, and landscapes [e.g. Koller et al. 2009: 2], it remains the case that – as observed over twenty years ago [Miller and Richards 1995: 20] – the focus of much virtual heritage is architectural [e.g. Bogdanovych et al. 2011: 140]. Perhaps because many of the early models were associated with museum displays, the question of appearance not surprisingly comes to the fore and there is a strong focus on creating the virtual models – collecting the data, building the models, and, to a lesser extent, archiving the products of virtual heritage. Particular interlinked concerns are authenticity and accuracy: for example, Roussou and Drettakis [2003: 47] argue that the general perception in virtual heritage is that realism directly maps onto the degree of authenticity, and similarly, the level of accuracy, legitimacy and realism of content is seen to be analogous to the level of perceived authenticity [Affleck and Kvan 2005: 170]. This presents a number of somewhat awkward circular relationships. At the same time, there is frequently expressed concern about the authority of the resulting model. For example, “Virtual reconstructions allow us to experience, amongst other things, heritage that is inaccessible and sometimes no longer existing. The manner in which they are produced however, is full of ambiguities ... It is important that the process of interpretation is discussed and highlighted, and the results not presented as absolute truth.” [Affleck and Kvan 2005: 172]. It is commonplace that the power of the digital visual is to assign a misplaced confidence in the viewer’s mind of the truth of what is displayed, not least when what is modelled is incomplete and/or not available for comparison. The processes behind a successful visual are normally disguised, so that the manner in which it has been produced, the variety of sources, multiple datasets, multiple scales, and the intellectual processes behind them remain invisible to the viewer and are reserved, if at all, for any accompanying process metadata or paradata. To accuracy, authenticity, and authority might be added accessibility since the reality of many examples of virtual heritage is that the often complex and elaborate models are reduced to selected 2D views for presentational purposes, which in some respects makes it little different to the classic visualizations of cultural heritage by artists such as Alan Sorrell and without many of the advantages of such traditional representations. Furthermore, software used in the creation of such models can be proprietary, expensive, and demanding high computer specifications. Consequently, models are frequently presented as a series of selected stills, or alternatively as a walk/fly-through in which the experience is tightly controlled